A $6 paid search ad and a little creativity landed one advertising exec his dream job. Alec Brownstein, a 29-year-old advertising copywriter, had a job, but wanted to move up in the world. So he went on to Google AdWords and bought the names of five of the top creative directors at ad agencies in New York. Dave McGinn explains how Brownstein did it.Read the whole story...

Rand Fishkin reports on a conversation held behind closed doors with a handful of industry CEOs. The group discussed content quality, which typically represents a subjective look at predictive high rankings in search engine queries. There are challenges on the horizon such as personalization, social search and Twitter data. Most of the group agreed to disagree on the future of high-ranking content and how to get there. Fishkin puts the conversation into perspective.Read the whole story...

Linking does have benefits if done correctly. Aaron Wall tries to convince himself that's the case by walking through several scenarios on how to fix what he calls the broken link graph.

He writes that, ironically, one major cause of that problem is spam. That spam comes from Google explicitly stating what not to do, but many people view that what-not-to-do checklist as a green light to plunge into opportunities that create havoc.Read the whole story...